Odd error when trying to install Firefox on my Windows 7 HTPC

This is the Firefox 20.0.1 installer grabbed directly from Mozilla's website:﻿﻿﻿

Tried it twice through Firefox's automatic update check (currently running Firefox 18 on the system), so I decided to download the installer and run it manually. After getting that error, I just assumed something was wrong with the installer, so I found an archived version of the Firefox 20.0 installer:

No other problems on the system, it's been off for the past month or so from a move and finally getting it set up at the new house.

I've already run SFC and it reported no errors, have run scandisk, and chkdsk as well. I am at a loss on this one, anyone want to take a stab at it?

Simple solution is install Chrome. FF is a steaming pile of crap since they started coming out with new versions every 14 seconds.

You're being a bit harsh on it. It's the most resource hungry, slowest and clunkiest of the Big Three with the poorest security model but it has a very well worked out modding community and the excellent GreaseMonkey scripting engine.

It's no rational actor's first choice (this should always be IE10 or Chromium), but it's certainly a special-case second choice.

I've got Chrome and Chromium already installed, and IE10 of course. Have recently started using Firefox more often (hence why FF18 is still there, instead of something within the last 6 months) and would like to get it updated.

No other problems on the system, it's been off for the past month or so from a move and finally getting it set up at the new house.

I've already run SFC and it reported no errors, have run scandisk, and chkdsk as well. I am at a loss on this one, anyone want to take a stab at it?

I've seen this before. It's caused by a corrupt extension in your user folder.

Uninstall Firefox then delete the contents of %USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and %USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles. This will delete your user profile and the corrupt extension.

If you don't want to delete your whole profile you can dig through %USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<profile name>\extensions to see if you can find the bad one or just delete all the extensions.

It was an otherwise new installation of Firefox, had no extensions yet, but figured I'd give it a shot in case there was something else corrupt in the profile.

Probably should re-seat cards and ram, I did do a spot check and all seemed ok, but didn't actually take anything out and do a proper re-seat. Could be something isn't sitting right after the move. And if not, there's always a wipe and reload. All the data is on a separate drive so it'd only be a minor annoyance to do so.

Run a CHKDSK /r from and administrative command prompt. Tell it yes to run on next reboot, then reboot. Come back in a few hours(depending on drive size and amount of data on it) and see if it was able to fix anything.

It's very unusual to have a memory or disk error that would be this consistent. You've reinstalled several times, so presumably you installed to different sectors of the disk, and if you had corruption over lots of the disk you would assume other applications would throw errors. I've seen memory errors that were application-specific, but that's not what's happening here. Something like a bad disk driver or a bad FAT would be causing a lot more problems.

You might want to dig through the /Program Files directory to make sure Firefox was really uninstalled. You also might want to look into the Registry to delete references to Firefox. It's possible that you have some kind of virus that has renamed and relinked the Firefox executable.

Grabbed it on my Mac and tried installing from a thumbdrive, no joy. Re-ran chkdsk yesterday, still showing no errors. No traces of Mozilla on the system anymore (at least that I can find), scrubbed all mentions of Mozilla from the registry.

Think I'm just going to wipe/reload today. Sometimes it takes a hammer

[edit]Got it back up and running. I always forget how freaking many updates there are on a non-SP1 OEM install... really need to slipstream that in one of these days. No problems getting Firefox (among everything else) installed. I'll just chalk this up to Gremlins.